Hi
I want to play two different layouts on two different screens from my laptop. I’m using two HDMI connections and the second screen is acting as an extended desktop. I’ve created my second instance by copying folder and renaming the player. I’ve managed to show the separate instances on the separate screens (I was just able to drag the folder containing my second instance to the extended screen and open the second player from there).
What I’d like to know is how to link one instance to a particular layout in the CMS as I really have only one Display? So have a layout for the canteen running on instance 1 (the laptop plus connected screen) and a layout for the reception on instance 2 (running on the extended screen)
Ok I’ll let people know where I’ve got to now. Once I’ve created the two instances(player 1 and player 2) and have them on separate screens I have to give them different Device Id’s so that will create another Display in the CMS.
So I open up the player options for Xibo player 1 (I cant find the options for player 2 in the folder I copied) and I’ve changed the ID in the advanced tab. Then saved this and went back to the CMs to approve the licence.
I now have two displays showing up. However even though I have different layouts running on the two displays, player 2 still doesn’t play its layout.
In my mind player 1 is now the new Display (cause I was only able to change its device Id) and player 2 should be the original display. But the original Display is not working while the new one is.
Ok it seems to be solved.
Unfortunately I wasn’t using the guide here correctly http://www.xibo.org.uk/manual/en/install_windows_client_multiple.html
When it says to put the “o” in the arguments I presumed it was some sort of switch as in “-o” to create an object in Linux. No you just put the letter “o” after the file path and this will open up the player 2 options which you can change the device id and save and you should get a fully functioning 2nd Display.
I’m sure I’ll have some other issues soon as I’m trying to link one of these Displays through a VPN connection to England.
Thanks for the heads up. I just tried using the two players while playing the same image from the same library and didn’t get any issue. I’m sure something would probably conflict if I left the library the same but out of curiosity what are the dangers of using the same library for many different displays (and is it just a problem for two display coming off the one machine?)
Because the Player cleans up files it thinks are no longer in use. So if you have different content showing on the two displays then they will delete eachothers media items forcing them to be continually re-downloaded.
It’s only a consideration when you’re running multiple Players on the same computer. If they’re on different computers, then they’ll be using a player library on each machine’s hard drive by default so they won’t conflict with eachother - unless you did something whacky like go out of your way to setup a network share and configure them all to use the same directory in that - in which case you’d have the same issue.
Each Player must have it’s own library directory to cache content to. No exceptions. It’s that way for a reason
